Technical Field
The present invention is directed to methods and processes for the conversion of natural gas to higher hydrocarbons. In particular, the present invention includes systems and facilities for natural gas processing.
Description of the Related Art
There exists a substantial infrastructure for petrochemical processing throughout the world. This infrastructure is deployed on virtually every habitable continent, addresses wide ranging industries, and employs a wide variety of different implementations of similar or widely differing technologies.
As a major constituent to this infrastructure, the gas industry itself involves multiple components from exploration, recovery, processing and conversion technologies in transforming natural gas into useful end products. The gas industry involves hundreds to thousands of processing and fractionation facilities in the United States alone. These facilities generally include all the requisite process equipment for processing and separating incoming natural gas into its constituent and valued components, the requisite gas delivery infrastructure, and storage and distribution infrastructure for a wide range of different products including liquid products.
Further processing, conversion and/or commercialization of these products involves still additional infrastructure. For example, conversion of ethane from gas to higher value chemicals, e.g., olefins, involves substantial infrastructure in the form of steam crackers, and their associated infrastructure. Similarly, in other geographies, olefin production relies upon the conversion of petroleum refining by products, or naphtha, through alternative cracking operations to produce ethylene and other olefins.
As will be appreciated, the capital costs associated with each of the facility types described above can run from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars each. Additionally, there are inputs and outputs, of these facilities, in terms of both energy and materials, which have additional costs associated with them, both financial and otherwise, that could be further optimized in terms of cost and efficiency. Finally, because different facilities tend to be optimized for the particularities of the market in which they exist, they tend to be rather rigidly run, without the flexibility or optionality to optimize for the temporal realities of their given market, e.g., a particular oil or gas environment.
It would therefore be advantageous to be able to leverage existing processing infrastructure for new processing methods and systems without expending significant capital resources in retrofitting that infrastructure, optionally taking advantage of the different inputs and outputs of these facilities to create much greater value from the same or similar infrastructure, raw materials, and/or process flows. The present invention meets these and a variety of other needs.